Last Star Burning

by Caitlin Sangster

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN NIGHT FALLS, SLEEP WANDERS away from me. The prickly feeling of eyes watching us still leaves me feeling restless and exposed. Helix and Howl volunteer to take turns watching, setting up on the ground to give us more room up in the tree.

  My breath freezes in an icy mist above me, but I’m hot inside the sleeping bag, squashed against June. Howl’s sleeping bag is probably in some Second’s tent right now, so we only have three. Helix volunteered to share, but no one took him up on it. It seems impossible that the outside of the fabric could be so cold when inside it’s like sitting in a campfire.

  June’s face next to me is calm and childlike in sleep. Innocent. Like Aya. Like my mother looks in her box above Traitor’s Arch.

  Sometimes Mother is just a silent form on the other side of her glass display case in my memories. A doll. Left up on the shelf to remind me of games, of pretending, of silly stories whispered in the dark. She’s a pain under my ribs, older and deeper than Tai-ge. The skin has healed over the festering wound, but it spews out in painful spurts when I remember.

  Mother’s crimes are the reason I spent the last eight years branded a Fourth. The reason I’m out here, peeling the blotchy shadows for movement, waiting for a shot to be fired. She’s handed me a life of sleepless nights worrying my roommate’s Mantis would stop working. Of being friends with Tai-ge, but not allowed to ever think of more than that. Why I have to worry about broken bottles and glass in my mouth, about the monster buried inside of me.

  But Kamar is just a fairy tale. Turned around, does that mean that I escaped because of her? I’m out here with Howl because of the things she did.

  If she was a rebel, she couldn’t have sold the City’s coordinates to the Mountain. They would have known where the City was already from anyone who had escaped the City or the farms. And why would she have left a bloody trail from house to house on the Steppe, First Circle members dead in their beds? What was the point? Why would she have gone back to the City at all after infecting me?

  No matter what she did or why, I can’t turn Mother’s story into some kind of fairy tale. Things aren’t going to line up no matter what angle I choose to look at them, because in real life, people aren’t separated into black and white like pieces on a weiqi board, good and evil.

  There is one thing that is black and white, though. Her hands pushed the needle into my arm, her fingers put the SS monster inside of me. Even if everything from those weeks is a fog of paralyzed nightmares, I do remember the stab of pain, and the feel of my mother hovering over me. She’s been rotting away in the deepest recesses of my mind since the hazy days after I woke up, with Seconds guarding my bedroom door and Father being dragged away, head down and hopeless. It’s too late to bring Mother out now and hope the decay will have magically disappeared.

  I slide down the trunk of the tree, frozen leaves crackling under my weight as I land. Helix rolls over, his eyes softly touching me in the moonlight. But he just pulls his sleeping bag back over his head.

  Howl sits up a few feet away, wrapped in his coat. “Something wrong?” There’s a line of dirt along his neck that looks smudged into a cross shape, kind of like Parhat’s scars. He tries to look down to see what I’m staring at, rubbing at his neck until the dirt is gone.

  “Nothing I can put my finger on. Something has just seemed off all day.”

  One side of his mouth quirks in a half smile. “Sick of walking behind that?” He jerks his head toward Helix.

  I shake my head. “More like we are being followed.”

  He nods, eyeing the trees around us. “I’m with you on that. Will you keep watch up there with June? Just in case?”

  The casual agreement takes me by surprise. “You mean just in case it’s her family?”

  Howl shrugs, meeting my eyes squarely. “Yes. But even if we get attacked by a bunch of hungry gores, it will be nice to have you up there out of reach.”

  I smile a little. “Don’t think I can take care of myself?”

  “I mean, if your aim is half as good as you claim . . .”

  What he’s saying sinks in slowly, dread flowing through to my toes. “You don’t have the gun down here?”

  Howl’s eyes open wide. “I thought you had it. Is it up . . . ?”

  I race back to the tree before he can finish his sentence. The twigs and branches scratch my face and arms as I scale the trunk to get back to our packs, back to June. But the platform is bare. She’s gone.

  “Howl!” My hands are sweaty, slipping against the plastic fabric of the pack as I search for the gun, but come up empty. All but four of the Mantis pills are gone as well. “We have a problem!”

  He doesn’t answer. “Howl?”

  I stick my head over the edge to look and my heart stops. Howl is kneeling in a pool of yellow light, a gun inches from his forehead.

  Cas and Parhat stand below me, each with a gun trained on my friend. Parhat looks even more terrifying than before, eyes boring into Howl like he’s breakfast. A shudder buzzes through me as I realize that might be the plan.

  Tian’s voice sings out from the trees, playing down my spine like the out-of-tune strings of a guzheng. “You can come down from there, Wenli. Sev. Whatever you’re calling yourself. And bring your new Menghu friend down with you.”

  Helix? My eyes find his sleeping bag, covered with leaves. Empty.

  Howl’s eyes catch mine from below and his head gives a miniscule shake. He returns to watching the gun leveled at his nose, almost cross-eyed. “What do you want? We don’t have anything of value.”

  Cas ignores him, his raspy, barbed-wire croon reaching up to wrap around my throat. “We don’t need you or your friend here all in one piece, girly. He’s going to be missing a leg if you don’t get down here right now.”

  “Okay!” I yell. “I’m coming down.”

  I take my time, crawling to the other edge of the pack, looking for something that might do as a weapon. A handful of quicklights? Cas and Parhat would have to lean down and let me stick it in their eyes for the broken glass to do any good. The pack has a metal frame, but after a moment of my fiddling, Tian loses patience.

  “I’ve seen a one-legged rabbit move faster than you up there. You get that rebel down here or you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Cas!” June’s husky voice floats into the light. “Leave them alone. I told you already, they aren’t worth a brush with the Menghu.”

  Cas’s head swings around, trying to pinpoint her voice. “And I told you, you dirty little mouse, that these folks will fetch quite a ransom with the rebels. We could be set for months. Years, even, now that the new kid is here to get us to the Mountain . . .”

  June steps into the dim circle of light cast by the quicklights, mouth screwed into a grimace. “You won’t get anywhere near the Mountain.” She points to me and Howl. “These two are being hunted by both sides. Between the Menghu and the Reds, you’ll be dead before you see a single pill. I took all they’ve got. It’s the best you’re going to get if you want to stay alive.”

  Tian strides forward, reaching a hand out to grab her. June jumps away, pulling Howl’s gun from the waistband of her pants, cold metal shaking in the dim light. “Don’t. Touch. Me.”

  Hate twists June’s face into something foreign, my insides clenching at the bared emotion on her face. What did Tian do to her?

  The old woman’s leathery face creases with dislike. “You gonna shoot the only mother you’ve ever known? Put that down.”

  The little girl skips backward, away from the advancing Wood Rat. “You are not my mother. If you even touch Howl or Sev—”

  Parhat lunges for her, but his cackling laugh cuts off with the sound of a gunshot.

  June looks around wildly for the shooter. Cas’s screech pierces my eardrums. More shots ring out, and suddenly the ground is a mass of people running, tripping, swearing. I lose my grip on the packs and fall into the mess, landing on something soft and bony, smelling of rancid sweat. Rolling away,
I open my eyes.

  It’s Parhat, mouth open in a surprised yell that never hit the air. Blood steams up through the cold as it seeps through his hair, dripping down into his ear. Cas’s body lies facedown next to him, their quicklights on the ground between us.

  I pick one up and immediately find Tian, lying prone a few feet away. Her eyes stare up slightly cross-eyed into the night, almost as though she’s trying to see the bullet hole between her eyes. Howl is gone.

  “What . . . happened?” My voice sounds crackly and unreal in my ears, my panic rising in the growing silence. “Howl! Where are you?”

  Helix jumps out from behind a tree, sprinting toward me. A manic smile tears his face in two as he yells, “You’re next, sweetheart!”

  My body moves before I can even think, crashing low into his legs and twisting so I land on top of them. He covers his face with one arm as he falls, and I take the half-second opening, scrambling up to dig one knee into his back. It takes three slams of his hand into the rocky ground before he lets go of the gun, fingers crunched and bloody.

  He pulls me over, rolling on top of me and pinning me to the ground with a knee in my ribs. Lifting my head and shoulders off the ground, he smashes me back down. “What is wrong with you, Sev? Your little Wood Rat is going to get away!”

  The sentence ends abruptly as the butt of a gun connects with his skull. He seems to fall on top of me in slow motion, head floating down to crack against my shoulder.

  Then Howl is on the ground next to us, pushing Helix off me. “Sev! Are you all right?”

  A breath rasps in my lungs as my throat refuses to open. He isn’t gone. Alive. His voice is in my ear, urgent and too loud, but I don’t pull away.

  I sit up, coughing. Inspecting Howl, I try to see if he is hurt, and I can see he’s doing the same to me. I can’t look away from him, knowing the moment I do, all I will see is death sprawled all around us. Helix did not spare anyone.

  “Where is June?” I’d thought Helix was going to shoot me, but I suddenly realize he must have been after her or I’d be dead. Fear pours over me in a white-hot sheet. Those shots seemed too accurate for him to have missed one little girl.

  Her voice splinters out from the trees, watery and broken. “Here. I’m here.”

  I breathe out the air frozen in my lungs in relief. We feel our way to her voice. She is hovering over one of the bodies, twisted where he fell, a bullet through the side of his head. Liming.

  I close my eyes, and it’s cold Sickly yellow light swirls all around me, the smooth cement bruising my knees and feet from kneeling too long. He’s flopped on the polished floor, buried by the cheers and jeering insults from the crowds behind us. His eyes are open, watching me. The memories I’ve long blocked hammer at my brain.

  June’s stifled sob tears my eyes back open and I kneel next to her, knowing there is nothing I can do to help. My hand on her shoulder can’t fill the hole ripped through Liming.

  “He was trying to help us.” Her voice is numb.

  Burying her face in my shoulder, June holds on to me as if I’m the only thing keeping her alive, anchoring her to this world. I’m not even surprised when Howl’s arms wrap around both of us, and I can feel his tears hot on my cheeks.

  • • •

  The morning breaks red and bloody.

  June leaves before sunrise, appearing back in camp with a tarp wrapped around some long branches and a fire starter from Cas and Tian’s campsite. We clear a space in the leaves and grass, holding the blue fabric down with a circle of rocks. Dragging her father onto the tarp, she covers him with the pine needles and wood. She stands for a moment at his feet, head bowed. When her eyes spark open, she lights the fire.

  I watch for a moment, his soul ascending with the smoke, finally free from SS.

  Back in the camp, she gathers her sleeping bag into her knapsack. Extracting the last bag of dried meat from my pack, she looks at me with a question in her eyes.

  “You can have it.” I nod. “But don’t leave us. Please. Come to the Mountain.”

  Her eyes find Helix, asleep by the tree. His hands are tied behind his back, but it won’t last. We can’t kill him as easily as he killed her family. Some of Tian’s hardness rolls over June’s face like a mask, and she just shakes her head.

  “What do you want us to do with the rest of them?”

  “Leave them for the gores.”

  Before she leaves, she presses a Junis leaf into my hand and says, “When you get out of there, find me.” And with that, she turns and heads off into the forest.

  She doesn’t look back.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 19

  HELIX RUNS HIS FINGERS ALONG the rough edges of a cave opening, the mouth jagged like broken teeth. He peers at the stones until his fingers find a blemish, a patch that is lighter than the speckled rock around it. He melts forward into the darkness and goose bumps prickle down my arms. Helix belongs in the dark.

  Howl’s hand is a comforting weight on my shoulder. “He was after June, you know.”

  I look at him, eyebrows raised.

  “You were in the middle. June is an Outsider. A Wood Rat. Helix doesn’t . . .” He shakes his head. “No. I’m not going to defend him.”

  I nod. I already know this, and it doesn’t make what Helix did any better. Steeling myself, I force my feet to move toward the cave, my toes dragging against the hard-packed dirt in protest. The image of Helix’s animal smile as he points his gun at my little sister twists in the shadows. June. Not Aya. My sister is dead.

  Together, we step into the mouth. The light spot is too distinct to be natural. It looks like the outline of a cat.

  “Menghu.” Howl’s hand lines up next to mine on the stone. “It’s their sign. The cache we hid in was marked like this too.”

  I fill my lungs until it hurts, until I’m about to burst. Mantis. This is the only way I get Mantis. “Let’s do this. Before I run.”

  Howl stares up at the opening as if he isn’t sure he wants to go in either, but then nods and leads the way.

  Musty air breaks over us like ice water, sinking into my skin and leaving me shivering. The cave ceiling slopes lower and lower the farther we go, until Howl’s head and shoulders hunch. Helix breaks a quicklight in front of us, his crouched outline glowing red instead of the cheery yellow I remember from City quicklights. The tunnel drills deep into the rock, twisting so the light is just a suggestion, almost a memory, ahead of us. For once, my imagination stays cold.

  I haven’t had a hallucination since we came across the frozen pile of soldiers. The bleeding eyes of the dead patroller paint themselves into the black all around me, and I shake my head with a wince at the memory. But it goes away. The dark is just . . . dark.

  After what seems like hours of stumbling after Helix’s red glow, I startle back when a bright blue light flashes in front of me and a luminous rectangle patch appears in the rock wall. Helix presses his hand to the telescreen, saying, “Lan Helix.”

  A telescreen? They have those up on the Steppe, maybe in the Sanatorium here and there, but there’s not many of them. How can the Mountain just casually leave one Outside to monitor the door?

  A cool female voice whispers through me, “Lan Helix, Menghu. Within assignment.”

  Howl steps up to the bright screen. “Sun Howl.”

  The female voice doesn’t answer for a moment, but the confirmation comes. “Sun Howl, Menghu. Within assignment.”

  Howl pulls me up to the light, gently pressing my hand against the telescreen next to his. “Say your name,” he whispers.

  “Jiang Sev.” I flinch when the screen pulses blue under my hand. It’s a degree or two warmer than the stone around us.

  The voice whispers again, “Jiang Sev. Under supervision. Sun Howl responsible. Please immediately process.”

  The telescreen goes black. Warm air rushes out into the cave, and the darkness ahead of us changes to twilight. Twenty feet in, a light clicks on overhead. The pebbled dirt under
our feet changes to metal grates and the smooth rocky walls are swallowed by blue-painted cement.

  Howl hangs back, as if he knows I wouldn’t be able to stomach walking with Helix where I can’t keep an eye on him. We stop when we get to a branch in the hallway. Helix catches my eye and winks, taking off down the hallway on the left without looking back. I repress a shudder.

  He didn’t say anything when he woke up this morning. Nothing about June being gone, not a word on the four dead Wood Rats. He just grinned an awful, sharp-toothed smile at Howl and led out.

  The farther we walk, the less comfortable I feel. After weeks of being Outside, the low ceilings feel too close. The tons of dirt and rock above me feel heavy and unstable, as though the whole place could come tumbling down on our heads at any moment.

  The hallway ends with a door marked in bright orange block characters: QUARANTINE.

  Howl pushes the door open for me, both of us blinking in the eye-wrenching bright lights of the small room. Windows threaded with metal wire cover the upper half of one wall, looking over five uniformed men sitting at desks. The blue paint on the walls is scratched and dented, as though a gang of angry kids took to the place with shovels.

  A young man about my age walks up to the nearest window and presses a button on the desk in front of him. His voice buzzes through the glass, lips not quite syncing with the words. “Nice to see you, Howl. Jiang Sev, I’m Raj. Dr. Yang gave us most of what we need for you to stay.”

  I lean over to Howl and whisper, “Didn’t you say anyone could come in here? As long as they have someone to vouch for them?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t think everyone who walks in here is as good-looking as we are.” He points to a deep dent in the wall, as if someone punched it repeatedly. “Or as well mannered. Must keep them separate at first.”

  Raj continues, “I’ll give you your bunk information and a schedule to go with your assigned collective in just a minute, and if you’ll stand still, the computer’s snapping your pictures for ID cards. Also, we’d like to do all the testing before we get you settled in.”